Lessons in Composting

We are learning so much by trial and error about composting. For the first two years our compost from the restaurant has been picked up by happy bug farms whom we work together with as much as possible. This year they are building a house on their farm and have stopped coming into the city so we have had to do our own composting. It has actually been great because we have multiple places where we need compost. Places like our permaculture garden, the yard at our new house, and also the plants and area surrounding the patio. We are renting out our house with the hollows permaculture garden to people who get a break on rent and in return help care for our hollows garden. We made a large pile of compost at the permaculture garden and when we moved and that got to be an inconvenient dumping ground we started a trial heap behind our dumpster, it quickly grew to be named “garbage mountain”. When the servers would ask where to put the canister of orange rinds and coffee grounds Kyle would tell them to, “put it on garbage mountain, but make sure to get it right up on top, and watch our for wildlife.”

Garbage mountain attracted magpies, rabbits, mice, crows, wasps…also it started to smell a bit and I was scared of the smell wafting over to the patio so I covered it with dirt and yard trimmings. It got me thinking that birds and insects can be part of composting because they are eating and carrying away the waste and composting it in their own way. Garbage mountain will provide the patio boxes with fresh beautiful compost soil for next year. We now tell the servers that garbage mountain is closed for the year. We live so close now that we walk our buckets of compost home at the end of the night to put in our big bin. Kyle really wants someone to try and mess with us when we are walking home so that we can throw compost on them. Next year we will hopefully start another permaculture garden in our new backyard with the help of our new head gardener. At the Hollows our dumpster only gets picked up once per month and it is never full, we just don’t have much waste.